


Alone Among The Wreck

by KagekaNecavi



Category: Marvel, Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Cap_Ironman Tiny Reverse Bang, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Possibly Unrequited Love, Superior Iron Man, old steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 20:57:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8072497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KagekaNecavi/pseuds/KagekaNecavi
Summary: While working with the Illuminati at the end of everything, Steve finds out they have Tony in a cage in Wakanda.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [Little Lion Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u-jGnIQwgo) by [Mumford and Sons](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mumfordsons/littlelionman.html). This is my entry for the [Marvel round](http://capim-tinybang.tumblr.com/post/150208967424/cap-im-tiny-rb-round-13-marvel) of the [Cap Iron Man Tiny Reverse Bang.](http://capim-tinybang.tumblr.com/) More notes at the end, including a content warning or two.

When he sees Stark’s cell, Steve stops in his tracks. On the way here his mind had been spinning and he’d thought of dozens of things he wanted to say to Stark, hundreds of ways this conversation could go. But now … now his mind just goes blank and he leans against the wall a little, watching Stark.

Stark seems unaware that he has a visitor, and Steve wants to keep it like that for a moment. He needs to collect himself again. Steve doesn’t know what he’d been expecting to see when he’d gone to confront Stark in the cage T’Challa and Reed said they had him in, but it isn’t this.

There’s blood on the transparent - nearly invisible - walls and the brick floor. Smears of reddish brown that probably belong to Stark, considering there’s blood on the armor and on Stark himself. Some of it looks like Stark may have tried punching his way out of the cell and split his knuckles open on the wall.

He looks a little gaunt, a little pale, and a lot haunted. T’Challa had said that Stark has been down here for months, and when Steve really thinks about that he does almost feels a little sorry for Stark. He knows how Stark gets, knows how fast his mind works and how frenetic he can be when he invents. Just being away from his work for so long must be torture in and of itself, not to mention the fact that he’s been stuck in the same cell for months, probably with little to no outside contact.

Steve doesn’t usually let himself feel his age, despite the fact that he now has a body to go with his chronology. He keeps himself moving too much to feel too worn down. But right now as he watches Stark sit there in his transparent, blood stained cell and knowing that the end of the world is coming soon, he feels every year weighing down on his shoulders.

Does he really want to do this? T’Challa and Reed had said that they’re fairly certain Stark is still inverted and they’d decided it was too dangerous to let him out, and looking at Stark not he’s certain of it. There’s something about him, about the way he’s sitting and holding himself that’s just different. This version of Stark always seems to be demanding things, as if the world owes him something. The real Stark, the right one, the one that Steve knew and was friends with and loved - and may still love, if he’s still in there somewhere - knew that he was smart and knew that he did good things, but he never truly thought he was a good man. That Tony Stark had been of the best men Steve had ever known and he’d never quite thought himself to be good enough.

And now that he’s not a good man any longer, he acts like he’s better than everyone else. What a mess.

The worst part is in the end it isn’t even Stark’s fault. Of course it’s Stark’s responsibility and if the world weren’t about to end he would make sure that Stark stood trial for what he did in San Francisco, but the _fault_  - the ultimate blame - lies with Red Skull.

He came down here furious. With Stark, with T’Challa and Reed and Hank McCoy and the whole Illuminati for keeping Stark here and not telling anyone. He even entertained the idea of picking a fight with Stark, of finishing what he started when he went down to Stark’s lab after he remembered that the Illuminati had wiped his mind, but now he’s just tired. He feels old and tired and he wants _Tony_  back.

“Are you just going to keep standing there, old man?” Stark asks, startling Steve. He hadn’t realized Stark had noticed him. Stark still isn’t looking at him, instead just staring at either nothing or the wall in front of him, but obviously he had to have been paying enough attention not only to notice a visitor but to recognize the visitor as Steve.

The nickname brings him back to that night not that long ago, but feels like years ago, when Tony woke him up to show him what he’d been working on. Steve has already been wondering for a long time if the Illuminati had already known then that the world was ending and there was no way to stop it.

Steve decides he may as well come out and face Stark, so he steps forward, holding out his hands to either side of his body.

“What did you come here for? To be self righteous at me until I feel like blasting myself in the face with a repulsor just to get you to shut up?” Stark asks and for a very brief moment Steve’s anger flares up again, hot and bright, then it settles down and - again - he just feels tired. It’s far too easy to think of several plans of Stark’s that have resulted in him either almost dead, temporarily dead, or as good as dead. Stark probably wants Steve to get angry, but that joke just hits too close to home.

“T’Challa said you were down here, so I had to come see for myself. Is that really that much of a surprise?” he asks, crossing his arms. He wishes there were someplace to sit other than the floor. At his age sitting on the floor isn’t a great idea at all.

“Does ‘I’m going to beat you bloody’ sound familiar to you?” Stark asks, then smirks a little, “Oh, wait, is _that_  why you’re here? To beat me again?”

“I don’t know anymore,” Steve says honestly. And he really doesn’t. This was pointless. He’s not angry enough now to argue with Stark and there’s no way they can reconcile now, with Stark still the way he is. “Goodbye, Stark.”

At this, Stark’s eyes go wide and he shows an emotion other than smug superiority - a moment of pure, unadulterated panic before he manages to twist it into something resembling anger. “What, you’re just going to leave me here to rot until the world ends?!”

Steve thinks of the lies, of what Stark did to San Francisco, of the betrayal, of the fact that Stark has been building weapon after weapon for the Illuminati for almost as long as they’ve known about the incursions. “Yes.”

“You can’t do this to me! Let me out of here!” Stark is standing now and he slams his fists against the cage, “I will not die in a cage! Let me die for _something_!” Steve shakes his head and leaves. As he goes Steve hears Stark continue to rage against him. When he’s almost out of earshot, he thinks he hears Stark switch to, “Goddammit Steve, I don’t want to die alone in this box.”

As far as he knows, though, that is exactly what happens to him.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning - Tony, who is still SIM!Tony, makes a joke about suicide. It makes Steve think of all the times Tony has been overly reckless.
> 
> A second warning - there's also a bit of focus on the fact that Tony has been in that cell for so long (I pulled the timing right from New Avengers 26, see references below, where Tony says "I've been here for months now. Sitting in this box, hour bleeding into hour.") and the repercussions that isolation of that kind might have on someone like Tony.
> 
> Edit September 19th at 8:14 am. On my phone, pardon any typos: A third warning. I realized this morning that there's a massive amount of implied character death here. Not just Tony’s, but also basically everyone's because end of the world. So I switched from no warnings to chose not to use warnings because I don't talk about the death in any real detail but it's still there, and I added the implied character death tag.
> 
> I used the research from [Things That We Could Be](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7021597) for this, since I didn’t want to do the research again, lol. Though I did end up rereading parts of Avengers vol 5 issue [#43](http://marvel.com/comics/issue/48397/avengers_2012_43) and [#44](http://marvel.com/comics/issue/48398/avengers_2012_44) and New Avengers vol 3 issue [#26](http://marvel.com/comics/issue/52257/new_avengers_2013_26). At one point something Tony says is totally pulled right from issue 43 of Avengers.
> 
> Also pretend the Shi’ar empire either never came or that Tony didn’t need to do his Icarus schtick to get rid of them because I don’t understand the fucking point of that anyway - it was just an unnecessary wrinkle in the whole thing. ‘Oh look an alien race is going to come destroy is 5 minutes before the apocalypse!’ Wtf is up with making things needlessly complicated.


End file.
